Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Post-natural wilderness

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the New Experience of a Post Natural Wilderness1

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the New Experience of a

Post Natural Wilderness

In The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy explores the post-apocalyptic genre, creating a storyworld that seems to negate life and nature. Taking a distance from his previous novels, in which the leitmotiv was the myth of the West, and the landscapes described were those of the hard, arid and violent American South, the author gives voice to the basic fear of a man that cannot provide a future for his child, in a world that has been destroyed by a natural catastrophe.Time and space references seem almost absent in the novel, but this absence finds its counterpart in the use of retro-narration, that to Uri Margolin is the expression of a desire for certainty and significance. The secrets hidden in the few natural elements which survived the apocalypse presume the possibility of afuture in a “new world”. Rebecca Raglon's essay “The Post Natural Wilderness and Its Writers” will be useful to introduce this idea of a new possible natural experience in American landscapes that have been destroyed by nuclear experiments, pollution and exploitation. The post natural wilderness opens new ways of living nature and of expressing this relationship in various artistic forms, not only through literature, but also through photography, as the works of Richard Misrach and Edward Burtynsky – among others – have demonstrated.

On the ashes of a world that has been destroyed by a

natural catastrophe, a man and his son are walking on the road

heading South, hoping that they will find a possibility of

survival in a warmer climate. The core of Cormac McCarthy's

The Road is this incessant and difficult journey among burned

woods and ruins of the capitalist world, where the landscape

is reduced to “ charred and limbless trunks of trees

stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and

the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened

lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a


clearing and beyond that a reach of meadow-lands stark and

gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned”

(McCarthy 8).

The fictional landscape created by the author is an

interesting mix of skeletons of burned trees, rests of

buildings and road infrastructures, electrical storms and

toxic winds, as if it were a new, hybrid element. Even if in

some way it could be seen as a reminiscence of the hard

Southern deserts described by McCarthy in his previous novels

– in which it is particularly visible the influence of William

Faulkner, to whom McCarthy has often been compared1 – the main

difference here is that the earth is not part of the cycle of

the seasons anymore, there is no motion that could relate this

“nature” to any idea of life, except for the falling of dead

trees in the woods, snow and rain. Sounds and colors have

disappeared too, so that what is left is “the cold and the

silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and

temporal winds to and fro in the void” ( McCarthy 11).

Together with the absence of motion, another element that

underlines the lifelessness of this “new world” is the lack of

a divine presence in it. McCarthy's novels are often

characterized by biblical references, quotations and sermons,

through which the author conveys the sense of the ancient and

dogmatic harshness of the old West, its people and its laws.

In The Road these references are not present, and if they are,

it is only in the form of denial: “with the first gray light

1 Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz in “Cormac McCarthy's The Road: Rewriting the Myth of the American West” explains how McCarthy has been associated to Melville for “his use of sermon-like, biblical cadences” and to Faulkner for “the imaginative scope of his declamations in dialect” (5).


he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out of the road

and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren,

silent, godless” (McCarthy 4).

The absence of a spiritual dimension of this “cauterized”

nature leaves space for an evil principle of destruction,

inhuman and voiceless, that can be both visible or not. At the

beginning of the novel the omniscient narrator, describing a

dream made by the man, evokes Plato's allegory of the cave;

the child leads his father by the hand in a dark cave, with

the only help of a torch, and in the cave they find a black

lake, near which a hellish creature opens its jaws wide:

and on the far shore a creature that raised its

dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared

into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs

of spiders. It swung its head low over the

water as if to take the scent of what could not see.

Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster

bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it.

(McCarthy 1)

Plato's allegory of the human quest for knowledge becomes

here a human discovery of the evil heart of nature and, in

general, of the world. The black lake denies the mythological

value of water as the symbol of birth, life and creation,

depriving the landscape not only of a Christian deity, but

also of a pagan one. The rituals that may be linked to

paganism are, again, presented in the negative form: human


skulls on fences, painted with dark colors and symbols,

reminiscent not only of war rites of ancient tribes, but also

of the image of the horror described by Conrad in Heart of

Darkness:

the wall beyond held a frieze of human heads; [...]A

dragon. Runic slogans, creeds misspelled.

[...] The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of

their skins and the raw skulls painted and signed

across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone

skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink like a

blueprint for assembly. (McCarthy 90)

The complete loss of spatial and temporal references is,

together with the absence of a leading moral principle, the

greatest obstacle that father and son have to face in their

journey

towards salvation. They own a map reduced to some rags of

paper, so they can approximately locate their position on the

road, but for what concerns the perception of time, there are

no elements that can help them understand what season, day or

hour they are living. In the omnipresent twilight of this land

without god, each becomes “the other's world entire” (Kunsa

6), they find a center in themselves, as if one's existence

would become the reference point of the other's.

We could say that the impression that a reader may have is

that of a total absence of time in the novel, or else of the

presence of a monotonous time, as if the characters move in a


motionless, suspended world. The relationship between story

and discourse is more or less symmetrical, apart from few

descriptions of memories of the past world, therefore the

dynamic of the novel is very limited, and at the same time

this choice, reinforced by the use of many ellipses – the text

on the page is visibly cut into fragments– creates the sense

of the slowness and fatigue of the travel of the two

characters.

As Carol Juge opines in “The Road to the Sun They Cannot

See”: “the dreams on the road are always a painful experience

for the characters” (22), because they bring to the surface of

consciousness both memories of a happy past – for the father –

and fears of a deathly future – for the child –. The past in

the novel is multidimensional, since it is the holder of the

cultural heritage of mankind, of all values and lessons,

therefore the father knows how important is for him to

remember and be the bearer of this knowledge, in order to give

it to his son: “ cold as it was he stood there a long time.

The color of it [fire] moved something in him long forgotten.

Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember” ( McCarthy 31).

The past is the spatial time where the father often loses

himself, being “still attracted to images, whether they are

fake representations of reality (his dreams) or

representations of a non-longer-existing reality (his

memories)” (Juge 22). In the comforting dimension of the

dream, he can still see his wife and the colors of the old

world, even if he knows the dangers of this abandonment: “ and

the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you?”


(McCarthy 21) The contrast between the sweetness of this

utopian images of the past and the livid, dead surface of the

present only relates to the father, because the child “is of

the new world” (Kunsa 65), he has no memories of the nature,

colors and sounds of the old world, not even of his mother.

His detachment from the past invests him of a special

sanctity, a purity of thought that opens to the hope of a new

beginning.

Even though The Road has often been considered as a gloomy

novel, far from any idea of happy ending, I think that it

still offers a way out to the desperate situation it

describes. The positive principle lies in the child, who

carries within him the lightness of an angel. He is compared

to a god – not only by his father, but also by Ely, the old

man they encounter on the road –, and he often becomes the one

who has to “carry the fire”, a role that he embraces with

wisdom and awareness: “you're not the one who has to worry

about everything. The boy said something but he couldn't

understand him. What? He said. He looked up, his wet and grimy

face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one” (McCarthy 259). Made

strong by the violence in which he has been immersed since his

birth, the child knows his mission and, most of all, he knows

the importance of remembering the difference between good and

evil, and always being the guardian of the Good.

Therefore, we could state that the future of the world lies

in the hands of this child, who can still commune with nature

and understand its language. As Ashley Kunsa points out in

“Maps of the World in Its Becoming”:


the narrative strategy is actually one of withholding

place names, a provocative rhetorical move that

forces the reader to imagine new possibilities, to think not

solely in terms of the world that was, but also of the

world that will be. […] Omitting the names of the

pre-apocalyptic world allows the ruined places (and

the ruined civilization of which they were part) to be left

in the past. (62-64)

In fact,the child is often described while giving names to the

world around him, or trying to read signs and symbols that

other people have left on the road.

The same idea of a meaning to be looked for in the past is

expressed through the use of retro-narration, a narratological

choice that confers a sense of certainty and order to the

novel, as Uri Margolin explains: “the privileging of retro-

narration is motivated by a basic readerly desire for both

closure and full disclosure, for certainty, totalizing

significance, and global coherence, all of which can be

attained only in fictional retrospective narration, preferably

of the omniscient variety” (qtd. in Herman 160). It seems that

through the description of the most violent aspects of evil,

McCarthy hides a strong message of hope for mankind, whose

possibility to survive is determined by an act of preservation

of the past. The story of this world of the future, destroyed

by the hands of men, is told in the past tense, as if there

would be another day, another future for it to be written. It


is not a case that the author decided to end his novel with an

image that evokes the presence of a primeval force hidden in

nature, of maps and codes of the past in which the mystery of

life is still hidden:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the

mountains. You could see them standing in the amber

current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly

in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand.

Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs

were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world

in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could

not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep

glens where they lived all things were older than man

and they hummed of mystery. (McCarthy 286-287)

In The Road, McCarthy explores a new development of the

dominant view of the West and, more in general, of the

wilderness as the first and ancestral American experience. The

exploitation of the wild areas has brought not to a total

destruction of them, but to the birth of what Rebecca Raglon

called a post natural wilderness, a new experience of the wild

in a place “isolated not by its remoteness or distance from

humans, but by its toxicity and foulness” (64). As Diane

Chisholm opines in “Landscapes of the New Ecological West”,

the New West is based on “a vision of the wilderness as

sublime, and the prospecting of sublimity being more artful

than industrial”(68), but at the same time it is also


duplicitous, in the sense that it is both protected and

exploited, glorified and degraded. Close to the National

Parks in the mountains, a whole territory of deserts and

wetlands – turned in wastelands – has been burned by a

technological militancy that includes atomic bombing, but it

would be wrong to say that these lands have become a

meaningless reality.

Examining some pictures of wild landscapes taken at the end

of the 19th century, in the middle of the 20th century and

nowadays, it becomes clear how the vision of wilderness has

profoundly changed and how the contemporary approach to the

topic is not only critical, but also aware of the new

aesthetic experience that this artificial and anthropogenic

nature can give.

Albert Bierstadt. Sunset in the Yosemite Valley. 1868.

Ansel Adams. “Thunderstorms, Yosemite


Valley.” 1945.

Both Bierstadt's painting and Adams's photograph are

perfect examples of the connection existing between the

American wilderness and the idea of the sublime. There are no

signs that reveal the presence of man, nature is pure, strong

and untouched, the sanctuary of the wildness. But the more

recent works of Richard Misrach and Edward Burtynsky show a

certain interest in landscapes that have not only been

violated, but also changed, de-framed and re-visioned by the

action of man.


Richard Misrach. “Bomb Crater and Destroyed Convoy,

Bravo 20 Bombing Range.” 1986.

Edward Burtynsky.“Alberta Oil Sands, #6.” 2007.

Far from being dry in aesthetic terms, these manufactured

landscapes are the expression of a desertified sublime

constituted by chemical rivers, sharp colors, industrial


plants and tailing ponds, a scenario that reminds of the one

described in The Road both in its emptiness and in its

possibility of redemption. The maps engraved on the scales of

the brook trouts are sure signs that the seed of nature is

alive, that there is a redeeming sense of continuity here,

rising from the ashes of the old world. The child knows how to

read and understand these signs, he carries within himself the

divine element of which nature has been deprived, therefore

his relation to it is stronger and deeper than that of his

father. More disillusioned, he is also readier to grasp the

good part of this new wilderness, both natural and human, and

it is this openness towards the other that will teach him how

to survive. In this way, the traditional role of nature as

teacher is restored.

The Road is a novel that forces the reader to come to terms

with questions and concerns that have to do with love,

survival and spirituality, but most of all it pictures the

common fear of man of losing everything he owns. The child is

a new Prometheus that carries the fire of hope and knowledge

in a world that seems to negate this possibility, because he

keeps alive in himself both his sense of belonging to this new

nature and all the lessons his father gave him before he died.

He is the encounter of the past and the present, he knows how

to read, pray and most of all, he knows how to love: “he tried

to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father

and he did talk to him and he didn't forget. The woman said

that was all right. She said the breath of God was his breath

yet through it pass from man to man through all of time”


(McCarthy 286).

As Ashley Kunsa stated in her essay: “ the end and the

beginning are inseparable in The Road, for it is the end of the

old world that signals the possibility of a new one, and the

novel's own ending so clearly harkens back to a beginning, the

beginning of time” (67). And what we have in the novel is

exactly this simultaneous being of old and new, of destruction

and creation, of artificial nature and new wilderness, as if

the only possible future for mankind would be through the

restoration of these basic forms. In the moment of transition

from what has been and what could be, McCarthy inscribes the

seed of hope, that has to be found in the sacred veins of the

earth.

Works Cited

Adams, Ansel. “Thunderstorms, Yosemite Valley.”1945. Photograph.

The Ansel Adams Gallery.


Web. 17 April 2012.

Bell, Vereen M. “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy.”

Southern Literary Journal

vol.15 No.2 Spring 1983:31-41. Print.

Bierstadt, Albert. Sunset in the Yosemite Valley. 1868. Hagging Museum,

Stockton CA. Web.

16 March 2012.

Burtynsky, Edward. “Alberta Oil Sands, #6.” 2007. Photograph. Oil

Series. Web. 17 April 2012.

Chisholm, Diane. “Landscapes of the New Ecological West: Writing

and Seeing Beyond

the Wilderness Plot.” Journal of Eco-

Criticism vol.3(1) Jan. 2011:67-93. Print.

Conrad,Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. by D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke. 2.ed.

Petersbourgh, Ont. :

Broadview Literary Texts, 1999.

Print.

Herman, David, ed. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis.

Columbus: Ohio

State UP, 1999. Print.

Ibarrola-Armendariz, Aitor. “Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

Rewriting the Myth of the

American West.” European journal of American

Studies vol.7 28 Sep. 2011:

1-13. Web. 4 April 2012.

Juge, Carol. “ The Road to the Sun They Cannot See: Plato's

Allegory of the Cave, Oblivion,

and Guidance in Cormac McCarthy's The


Road.” Cormac McCarthy Journal

vol.7 No.1 2009: 16-30. Web. 13 March

2012.

Kunsa, Ashley. “ 'Maps of the World in Its Becoming': Post-

Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac

McCarthy's The Road.” Journal of Modern

Literature vol.33, No.1 Fall 2009:

57-74. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006.

Print.

Misrach, Richard. “ Bomb Crater and Destroyed Convoy, Bravo 20

Bombing Range.” 1986.

Photograph. Earth Now: American

Photographers and the Environment.

Web. 17 April 2012.

Raglon, Rebecca. “The Post Natural Wilderness & Its Writers.”

Journal of Eco-Criticism vol.1

(1) Jan. 2009: 60-66. Print.

Irene Nasi


Documents

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Post-natural wilderness